Why Rituals Hold the Key to More Human Marketing

Attend any marketing meeting in the last five years and you’ve seen some version of the following headlines dotted throughout presentations:

Personal beliefs are more polarized than ever.

Discourse is dead as we retreat to our echo chambers.

We’re more connected but more alone than ever.

Overexposure to news fuels anxiety to record numbers.

You may read these and find yourself guilty of having included them on a slide. I have. There is truth in these statements, but they are rarely accompanied with any real insight that helps marketers make better decisions about their strategies or campaigns.

This is all a symptom of a wider problem plaguing the marketing and advertising world—we’ve cut out nuance and depth in our pursuit of efficiency and personalization at scale.

Let’s be honest. Marketing has lost its meaning. Despite being awash in an endless sea of data points and content, marketing has become generic and disposable. In fact, research from SAP Emarsys found a third (29%) of people have abandoned a brand they were once loyal to because they grew ‘bored’ of it. The scary part is, a large contingent of our industry seems content with this as long as we’re nudging people to buy something. And this is a problem, especially when you consider Gartner research revealed a significant portion of consumers (more than 50%) will stop engaging with brands that communicate in ways they find invasive or irrelevant.

Depressed yet? Here is the part where we stop complaining about the problems and start being a part of the solution.

Two years ago, my MSQ colleagues and I were lamenting the Groundhog Day feel of seeing the same briefs with same problems and same insights coming our way. Breaking the cycle would require new inputs. Inputs that didn’t rely on high-level trend reports, toothless competitive analyses, or broad audience segmentation.

We asked ourselves how we could understand human condition on a deeper level and aligned on a hypothesis: Rituals are a gateway to adding more meaning to our lives and understanding consumer rituals will help us bring more meaning to our marketing.

Rituals trigger us into action and move us mentally and emotionally from one space to another. While routines and habits are all about efficiency and automation, rituals animate our lives and make us better versions of ourselves – a Sunday brunch with your spouse recharges you for the week ahead, a skincare routine gives you more confidence than a therapist, using you intuition to select your clothes for the day is an act of creative expression, and gameday superstitions give you, and an entire city, hope. These rituals, and others like them, show us the messiness, rawness, and realness of the human experience. Rituals peel back the layers of human behaviour and help one understand why people behave and live the way they do.

We went around the world and back gathering data, both quantitative and qualitative, mining search and social data, and interviewing behavioural science experts and published our findings on rituals in an in-depth report with WARC. The results were incredible. Two thirds of consumers engage in rituals daily, and nearly half have had these rituals for more than five years. And more importantly, 72% incorporate a specific brand into their rituals - mainly to bring a sense of familiarity and enhance the overall experience.

Here’s an example of one of the rituals we observed:

Marketing would see at a morning coffee-school run between a mother and daughter as an opportunity to sell you a product or brand. But if you were to observe this ritual closer you would see this is a chance for mom and daughter to learn from one another; for mom to instill confidence in her daughter as she prepares for college. You would see them game planning their vacation, having hard conversations about money, and love and loss. You would see the car ride end at school, daughter “armed for the day” and mom filled with “joy” after connecting with her daughter.

There’s deeper insight to these moments that can breed effective marketing, but since we’re all about speed these days, here are three quick strategies you can use to understand rituals and the power they have for consumers and your brand:

Rituals provide control in a world of volatility. Life is busy, messy, and out of control. We crave order and stability amid chaos. Rituals slow us down and shut out the noise of the outside world. Over one-third of people believe “rituals offer structure to everyday life,” and “rituals allow me to escape the stresses of my life.” It’s in those moments, whether it’s five minutes or two hours, that we’re absorbed in something that’s just for us.

Rituals nurture our identities. One phrase that came through loud and clear during our research, ‘I wouldn’t be who I am without my ritual.” We saw, first-hand, how rituals connect people to their heritage, empower individuals to express their personality, and allow them to delve into their passions no matter their age, race, or community.

Rituals bond us together. Rituals are a force function for belonging and they connect us to something bigger than ourselves. From game day get-togethers and family dinners to game nights and daddy-daughter days, Rituals exist to enhance our experiences with others, physically and emotionally.

More than anything, studying rituals has allowed me to see small parts of the human experience unfold right before my eyes. I have felt the emotion in the room. Through our research, I have renewed sense of empathy for the people we are trying to reach every day. And to me, there is nothing more powerful for a marketer than the ability to identify with another human being.